Talk by Alan Cummings: A personal history of the Japanese Underground
Alan Cummings
Talk charting the radical history of experimental music in Japan + the lowdown into the careers of many of the artists appearing at MLFC.
Arika have been creating events since 2001. The Archive is space to share the documentation of our work, over 600 events from the past 20 years. Browse the archive by event, artists and collections, explore using theme pairs, or use the index for a comprehensive overview.
Talk charting the radical history of experimental music in Japan + the lowdown into the careers of many of the artists appearing at MLFC.
60 cycle hums, jagged static cracklings, and clipped electron pinpricks, mutating them into sublime, post-techno grooves
As opposed to suggesting soundtrack’s to Brakhage’s works [which are almost entirely silent] Text of Light use his works to stimulate improvisation, enveloping them into the structure of the group much like an additional musician.
Electronic music, time, thought, the word, and consecutive matters
Do almost nothing: re-present (unaltered and arranged by chance) silent family home movies handed down to Flo, (Ken’s wife) and follow them with a “teach yourself Yiddish” cassette tape.
Miniscule free-noise hissy-fits and broken instrument scrape/ squeal jams from the fools what brought you Giant Tank.
Slapstick comedy, monologue, and a kind of live sculpture transformed through video, props, musical instruments and make-up.
For this one off performance Vibracathedral Orchestra are joined by Matthew Bower and John Godbert from mighty UK heavy/drone/psych free-noise behemoths Skullfower, Sunroof! and Total.
Renouncing the bind of the written word, Chopin’s sound poetry is a magical evocation of the pure powers of the voices, stripped bare of language.
Nothing if not repetitive, film is founded on the incremental succession of minute difference. But how does repetition of the same play out, and is it a tool to comment on the standardising repetition of the mass media?
A festival hewn from passions for experimental music, film and visual art and for a passion in figuring out how they can relate to, cross-fertilise and inspire and each other.
“Mackey composes realist-mythic layering of lyrical prose unlike anything being written today.” — New York Times. “Our greatest living epic poet…Mackey’s poetry and criticism have reinvented modernism for our time.”— LitHub